Three-minute read
The regime in Tehran is behaving as if its principal worry is not a foreign plot but a domestic generation. In late October and early November 2025, state organs and clerical spokesmen repeatedly framed young Iranians — the so-called Generation Z — as a cohort susceptible to “foreign” recruitment and therefore an existential threat. That sequence of messages, funerary-site clearances and public warnings points to a single, political calculation: the leadership believes an organized, youthful alternative already exists and it is moving from symbolic dissent to durable organization. The reaction has been twofold — theatrical prosecution and public menace abroad, and cultural and physical erasure at home.
The rally that rattled the clerical elite
On October 25, 2025, a large gathering of young supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the People’s Mojahedin Organisation (PMOI/MEK) took place, with participants drawn from Europe, North America, Canada and Australia. NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi addressed the crowd and cast the moment as decisive: “The time of the most definite battles and uprisings has arrived. The determining force is the young and rebellious generation of Iran,” she said. That formulation — an organized, transnational movement claiming to prepare and to be prepared inside Iran — is precisely what alarms the clerical leadership.
State and security outlets responded immediately. The IRGC-linked Mashreq News accused the PMOI of “luring young people with false promises and monthly stipends,” branding supporters as mercenaries. Friday-sermon pulpits and regime spokesmen echoed the theme: Mohammad-Javad Haj Ali-Akbari warned that “the battle is in the schools” and that “the enemy seeks to seize the minds of our youth.” An adviser to the presidency posted bluntly on X on October 31, 2025, that “Gen-Z is against us,” urging the government to stop “sidetracks” and find remedies. These are not stray tweets; they are coordinated, repeated signals.
What 20,000 Message Tell You That #Iran’s Regime Won’thttps://t.co/HTKz3FQ1pr
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) June 27, 2024
Erasing memory
The regime’s fear does not stop at rhetoric. During August 2025 reports emerged that a section of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery that contained graves of executed MEK members and other victims of the 1980s purge (Section 41) was being levelled and converted into a parking area. In early November, Tehran’s mayor Alireza Zakani reportedly told state-affiliated Ensaf News on November 6 that the action had been taken under a “security decree.” Municipal officials later framed the conversion as an administrative necessity — “we needed parking lots” — language that understates a deliberate policy to remove physical traces of past mass-violence.
A municipal razing of memorial space is not mere urban planning. It is a political act: destroying sites of memory removes visible evidence that an alternative narrative exists and that martyrs of the 1980s had been public and commemorated. That erasure is especially consequential now that the memory of those decades is contested and younger generations were not alive to witness it. If the state cannot sustain its founding myths through legitimacy, it will attempt to deny the material record on which counter-claims rest.
#IRGC-Linked Media Accuses @Mojahedineng of Targeting Youth Amid Growing Influencehttps://t.co/prg0rozDEV
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) April 3, 2025
Why the leadership now sees Gen-Z as existential
Three linked developments explain the regime’s alarm. First, Iran’s demographic profile—where roughly 60% of the population is under the age of 40—means that most citizens were born after the revolution and do not share the ideological memory that legitimized clerical rule for older generations. Second, the sequence of national protests that surged after 2017 exposed an organized pattern of local activism that the state cannot simply contain with normal policing. Third, the Iranian Resistance — through large diaspora gatherings, media and a web of “Resistance Units” inside Iran — presented a clearly articulated political alternative (a secular democratic republic, gender equality, non-nuclear posture) that appeals to some protest constituencies.
The combination of a hungry, networked youth and visible exiled organizations with operational messaging transforms what the regime once treated as fringe into a strategic problem. It is not merely that Tehran fears overthrow; it fears a successor project that can organize across borders and inside the country in ways the clerical state cannot reliably penetrate or censor.
#Iran News in Brief
During his Friday prayer sermon on June 9, Reza Nouri, the Iranian regime Supreme Leader’s representative in Bojnourd warned against #MEK and called on the state officials to stop the youth from being influenced against the state.https://t.co/ABgWFJ8lRo pic.twitter.com/se5hfR4nMp— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) June 11, 2023
What this means
What we have seen over the past two weeks is a coherent regime strategy: amplify the threat narrative, erase public traces of past repression that might validate dissent, and use theatrical legal processes to intimidate both exiles and their host governments. The intended domestic effect is deterrence through demonization; the intended international effect is to complicate advocacy and asylum politics for activists.
A regime confident of its legitimacy would neither stage repeated public witch-hunts nor strip away cemeteries that memorialize victims of state violence. That it does both suggests not strength but vulnerability: the leadership is engaged in defensive containment because it believes that an organized, youth-led democratic alternative is no longer a remote possibility — it is a living political force.
If the authorities’ objective is to make the problem vanish, demolition and denunciation will not make it go away. They may succeed in intimidating some; they will not erase the political fact they fear: a younger generation, socially networked and impatient, is shaping the terrain of Iran’s politics in ways that the clerical state finds increasingly difficult to control.